Lord Leslie Hore-Belisha, first Secretary of State for War in Britain’s War Cabinet and Minister of Transport and of National Insurance in various Cabinets, died in Rheims yesterday where he had led a British Parliamentary delegation on a goodwill to mission to France. Lord Hore-Belisha was 63.
Born in London, Lord Hore-Belisha was an Orthodox Jew, an Elder of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue and one of its representatives to the Board of Deputies. He was educated at the University of Paris, Heidelberg University and Oxford University and saw active military service in the first World War, emerging as a major.
When he became Secretary of State for War in 1937, he introduced a number of reforms in the British Army which brought that army into shape to enter World War II, In 1939, chiefly at Lord Hore-Belisna’s insistence, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain introduced conscription. He resigned during the first year of World War II for reasons which were never made public. However newspapers of the time reported that there had been military objections to his race.
Although a member of the Conservative Government which enacted the White Paper of 1939 restricting Jewish immigration into Palestine, Lord Hore-Belisha was conspicuously absent when the vote was taken on the measure in Commons, He was a Privy Councillor since 1935. In 1954 he was elevated to a baron and he entered the Upper House. Recently, he had been interested in the possibility of digging an alternative canal to the Suez across Israel territory.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
